One major concern in the tech community is the loss of privacy on the internet. With the internet being increasingly used as a site for personal activity and business, such loss is worrisome to many. Search providers store vast amounts of personal information based on your web browsing practices, which some fear could be used against them for medical discrimination or other malefic uses if the information fell into the wrong hands.

In September, Google, who is one of the largest collectors of such information, announced an initiative to make its user logs anonymous after only 9 months. Now Yahoo has one-upped Google by announcing that it will anonymize its own user data stockpile after only 90 days.

It will anonymize data on page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks anonymous as well as its user logs after the 90 day time frame. It says it will make exceptions in cases of "fraud, security and legal obligations".

Yahoo had previously been on a 13-month purge time-frame, installed July 2007. Anne Toth, Yahoo's head of privacy, saw the new move as a way to outcompete Google, while maintaining the data critical to Yahoo's business. She and Yahoo made the decision after careful review of the company's worldwide data collecting practices.

The company describes exceptions to the new policy, stating:

To protect users and our business partners, there will be some specific and limited exceptions to the anonymization policy. In order to fight fraud and preserve system security, Yahoo will retain system specific data in identifiable form for no more than 6 months -- but only for this purpose. Yahoo may have to retain data for longer periods to meet other legal obligations.

The new development offers perhaps the most compelling argument to date for users to switch from Google to Yahoo, a key development, considering that Yahoo has been losing market share to Google for much of this year

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Well, I'm apparently less paranoid about the so-called privacy concerns with Google and other search engines tracking what I've searched. In general, if you make any assumptions at all about me based on what queries have been submitted from my IP, you're likely to be far off the mark.

That said, I don't grasp the benefit to anyone of a search engine tracking search data over any significant period of time. If you want to show me ads on the result page based on what I just searched for, fine. But if you're correlating today's search for ethanol fuel with last month's search for corncob art to show me ads for farm equipment, you're just wasting the advertiser's money.

Here's a thought, give me two search buttons to choose from: 1)Search with random ads, 2)Search with correlated ads. I'll let you know if there's even a remote possibility I might be interested in buying something.

"The whole principle [of censorship] is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak." -- Robert Heinlein